This is a depressing, if unfortunately reasonable, suggestion. Or really, I would take an old phone reset to factory defaults and my Chromebook "power washed". Both are trivial to setup once landed if needed.

Jason McCampbell: Yes, I'm very curious to see whether it holds up. What I haven't heard is whether it addresses oddities in the cosmic microwave background explained by dark matter or not. Dark matter does seem inelegant, though I kind of like the one hypothesis that it's a bunch of 20-30 solar-mass black holes drifting around. :)

The A16Z podcast on the New Horizon's probe is excellent, particularly for anyone who really likes hard-code tech like signal processing or a bit of cold war intrigue. I hadn't realized how quickly New Horizon's had been put together in order to meet the launch window.

There are also a lot of interesting side stories such as clever uses of a receiver on the ground capable of picking up a 1 one-millionth of a watt signal leaking from a spacecraft in orbit.

Losing 40+% of jobs is sobering, hopefully pessimistic. But I'm glad the concept is gaining visibility. This is a good read; the amount of automation coming is staggering. Heck, an AI prof at Georgia Tech wrote a bot to handle student questions good enough the students didn't realize one of the "TAs" was a computer. Boom goes the call center...

Some fun with Google Assistant. For someone who's been messing with voice recognition systems since the 80's, the recognition abilities are amazing. It failed to understand my intent but always got the recognition part right, even when I was dictating nontrivial arithmetic.

Jonathan March: Still impressive, but google did mis-parse wikipedia's article on sand, which says "Sand grains are between gravel (with particles ranging from 2 mm up to 64 mm) and silt (particles smaller than 0.0625 mm down to 0.004 mm). So 2 mm is actually the way upper end.

Jason McCampbell: Good catch. Yes, their actual voice recognition works well, but understanding the meaning and apparently the content being searched still has holes. I'll edit it for coarse sand instead.

I love the sheer audacity of this plan. But if it works, he now owns a massive piece of critical, hard to replicate infrastructure. It sounds like they have learned at least a few lessons from Iridium.

Eric Hansen: Like AT&T's wire network in the early 20th century, it worked best as a federally mandated monopoly. To be sure, it will need heavy regulation to not end up like AT&T has. Repeatedly

Mike Ferryall: I'm a couple of years away from building a house in a rural area. If this broadband plan actually happens, I could have better internet than where I live now, inside Tulsa city limits.

Jason McCampbell: +Eric Hansen Yes, that's my worry, too, though I suspect that may be like satellite TV where they could dominate in rural areas but have a lot of competition in more urban areas. At least that's my hope.